Fanshawe College Redesign

Fanshawe College, based in London, ON, Canada, had recently undergone a branding exercise that resulted in the development of a brand strategy and visual identity. To support this effort, all of the college’s marketing and communications materials needed to be updated to reflect the new brand position.

In addition, the college appreciated that its website was an integral part of not only its academic pursuits, but also its marketing, communications, and student recruitment goals. The new solution needed to support the college’s efforts to market to several constituencies, improve the information architecture to facilitate intuitive navigation and progression, and to provide a more intuitive user experience for the content’s managers, including better integration into social media and improved ability to post dynamic content.

Other considerations included:

• Integration with existing enterprise applications like Colleague, Datatel.
• Responsive design.
• Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities (WCAG 2.0 AA) compliance.
• Creation of template systems allowing for flexibility while maintaining visual and functional consistency.

Fanshawe wanted a unique, robust design that emphasized visual content. Digital Echidna wrote a custom sub-theme atop a contributed theme called Aurora.

In addition, Fanshawe was using a legacy system to handle ordering and payment processing. As a result, Digital Echidna wrote a custom module to facilitate transition from course selection (through the Drupal 7 solution) to the legacy system (for processing).

Fanshawe has many departments that maintain program and course data in several applications at the college.

The college wanted to be able to integrate these disparate sets of data on their public website with the intent that:

• Students would have the latest updated information.
• Staff would not have to maintain duplicate sets of content.
• IT staff would not have to write a new custom API to expose this data.

To meet Fanshawe’s goals, Echidna:

• Worked with the college’s project team to itemize the sources of data and clearly define the specific information and fields needed on the site.
• Wrote a customized technical specification document for Fanshawe’s IT team, so they could write the proper queries that extract the desired data into CSV spreadsheets.
• Customized our development process to accommodate Fanshawe’s existing team processes in order to help reduce the IT team’s workload.
• Determined how often each set of data was updated and needed to be synchronized to the website.
• Set up nightly processes that imported data while traffic was low.
• Set up an interface, so that content editors could manually import urgent data updates to the website on a granular basis.

Digital Echidna’s development team used the Feeds module to parse the CSV files into Drupal 7 content. Digital Echidna then wrote a custom module that augmented Feeds so we could handle the special characters and exceptional cases that were present in Fanshawe’s data.

Digital Echidna wrote documentation that explained the data’s transformational journey from being typed into Colleague, exported into a CSV file, and being imported by Drupal 7 to live as public-facing content. As there are four teams involved in this process, it was valuable for each team to understand the processes involved. This also facilitated the opportunity for the teams to diagnose perceived issues with the import process and correct them.

As per the college’s RFP, the project was to begin in November 2014, with the intent to replace the current site by September 2015. As well, there was an expressed desire to have the website in a state of readiness by June 2015 to allow for its community to revise migrated content.

The site launched Sept. 23, 2015. Digital Echidna structured the development of the site to prioritize content migration, so that content editors would have a large window of time to edit and manage migrated content.